Dizzee Rascal release of the single Love This Town, a rousing, arms-in-the-air paean to London from his fifth album, called simply Fifth. The video is a riff on the London riots in which a gang of menacing-looking masked hoodies perform good deeds, like some boy scout grime posse.

What about his professional future? “I was at a party, and Nellee Hooper introduced me to Quincy Jones, and told him I’d done really well selling records in England,” he replies. “Quincy told me the music industry was dead. He told me it was all about cellphones in China now. We had a bit of an argument about it but I kind of knew he was half right because he’s Quincy Jones, and because the record industry is kinda f***ed right now.

The music producer – a regular collaborator of Justin Timberlake – has been served divorce papers by his wife of five years, music executive Monique Idlett-Mosley, who is reportedly seeking child support for their five-year-old daughter and her 10-year-old child from another relationship. According to court documents obtained by US gossip site TMZ, Mrs Idlett-Mosley – formerly Monique Idlett – claims that Timbaland has “publicly and privately proclaimed this child as his own”.

According to documents she will seek permanent alimony from Timbaland, real name Timothy Mosley, whose fortune is reportedly around $80 million.

Madonna dropped out of the University of Michigan in 1978 to pursue her dreams of being an artist in New York. What greeted her was a city that was harsher than she could have imagined.

“New York wasn’t everything I thought it would be,” the pop icon wrote in an essay in the current issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “It did not welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint. Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my back, and had my apartment broken into three times. I don’t know why; I had nothing of value after they took my radio the first time.”

The pop-icon-in-the-making found her new home to be exhilarating, but also the sort of place her childhood in the suburbs of Detroit hadn’t prepared her for.

“But I was also scared sh–less and freaked out by the smell of p— and vomit everywhere, especially in the entryway of my third-floor walk-up,” she wrote.

She never gave up on trying to become a professional dancer, doing what it did to chase her dreams, including working as a nude model for art classes to pay her rent.

“I was defiant. Hell-bent on surviving. On making it. But it was hard and it was lonely, and I had to dare myself every day to keep going,” she wrote.

Finding The Funk, our latest Rock Doc, recently premiered in New York City, drawing veterans from across the world of music. George Clinton, one of funk’s foremost innovators, broke down why any true artist should study the genre’s roots to fully understand its significance.

The legend dissected the styles that lent themselves to funk’s birth in the late 1960s. “Blues is the real cohesiveness,” said Clinton, who also labeled R&B as “that commercial funk that everybody loves to dance to and make love to.”

With Clinton dubbing rock as the music that makes “you finally bust loose,” he straight up captured funk’s raw intensity with one basic statement: “Funk is nasty!”

Alex Turner has banned his mother Penny from attending the same festivals as him as it means he can’t pull any mischievous stunts when she’s around.

The Arctic Monkeys front man was left slightly annoyed when his mum Penny bagged her and her pals a ticket to Glastonbury festival in Somerset, England, this summer in celebration of her birthday because it meant he couldn’t pull any mischievous stunts.

Speaking to The Sun newspaper, he said: “She had a lot of fun – maybe more than me.

“She was there with all her gang. I didn’t even get the tickets for them, she went and organised it for herself, for her birthday.